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MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO Postmodernist Features in Ali MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO FACULTY OF EDUCATION Department of English Language and Literature Postmodernist Features in Ali Smith’s Novels Diploma Thesis Brno 2009 Supervisor: Written by: Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D. Pavla Navrátilová Declaration Hereby I state that I have worked on this bachelor thesis by myself and that all the sources of information I have used are listed in the References. I approve that this work is kept at Masaryk University in Brno in the library of the Faculty of Education and made available for study purposes. In Brno, 15 April 2009 Pavla Navrátilová 2 My grateful thanks go to Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D., who commented on my work. 3 Contents: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………..……5 POSTMODERNISM…………………………………………………...…..….9 HOTEL WORLD………………………………………………………..…….18 THE ACCIDENTAL ………………………………………………………….35 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………….…55 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………….……58 ELECTRONIC SOURCES ………………………………………………….58 RESUMÉ………………………………………………………………………62 4 Introduction Ali Smith has become one of the British remarkable contemporary authors whose works have successfully entered the literary world. Her novels Hotel World and The Accidental were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for fiction and the Orange Prize for fiction. However, apart from her book of short stories, only her novel Hotel World was translated in Czech language as Hotel svět . Smith claims that her novels contain the multi levelled narrative in order to guarantee the freedom of each character to tell a different story. This fragmentation of the structure of both novels, namely in Hotel World , has become the most obvious feature of her texts. I will focus in detail on this fragmentation, as a significant Postmodern attribute. I will also concentrate on women as the main characters. I will use the information from Smith’s biography to explain specific segments of the narrative. This work will deal with the feminine aspect of the novels and the connection of this aspect to Postmodernism. Ali Smith’s biography is written in a few short lines. “Ali Smith was born in Inverness, Scotland in 1962 and currently resides in Cambridge, England. After contracting chronic fatigue syndrome, she left her job as a lecturer at Strathclyde University to focus on her writing” (Flanagan). The Wikipedia offers only slightly more pregnant information about this Scottish author: She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia , she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. Openly gay, she has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 20 years. Ali Smith claims that reading her novels and short stories demands a cooperation from their readers: “It asks a reader to do quite a lot of work, and to participate. For me it's the thing that drives the novel form” (“Interview with Ali Smith). She explains the difference between her short stories and novels conceptions. The main distinction relates with the possibility to perceive the complexity of the characters and their worlds that are “hermetic and […] less fragmented” (“Interview with Ali Smith”). Before 5 writing Smith prepares a plan and she develops a theme connected with individual character or the particular setting in a story or in a novel: “I think I begin with a small outer or inner fact about someone, usually in his or her voice, whether 1st person or 3rd, doesn't matter” (“Interview with Ali Smith”). During the writing she often realizes that “then it does what it wants anyway, often in opposition to what imagined I wanted” (“Interview with Ali Smith”). Smith likes to focus on a typical attribute that belongs to the character and builds the plot upon it: “One little thing about them can tell me (and a reader) something about him or her and imply lots of other questions and things, which then begin to expand out of this one small thing”. One reader asks Smith about the conditions she needs for writing and she answers similarly as Virginia Woolf: “You need space that's yours”. Immediately Smith adds that “You need to open your senses out away from yourself, so you can hear and see and etc - outside yourself, beyond yourself” (“Interview with Ali Smith”). Hotel World and The Accidental acquired inconsistent reactions from literary critics. Amanda Thursfield reviews Smith’s novel Hotel World and observes the system of interconnection among all five parts of the novel. She also compares the partiality of the chapters to the complexity of the world around. Similarly to the real life Smith does not reveal majority of important facts to the reader. The less important facts are exposed to the reader, the more options of the story exist. Thursfield claims that Smith possesses a “rigorous self-discipline in the planning process”. Simultaneously she denies that Smith is “an over-deliberate, uninspiring writer”; on the contrary Thursfield emphasises Smith’s interest in ambitious themes: “love, particularly that between women, death, loss, guilt, grief, illness, time and the chasms of misunderstanding between the generations”. These themes are variously elaborated and touched by different writers but Smith “seems to see them in a new, fresh light”. Thursfield also notices the unanswered questions that occur in Smith’s novels and which become puzzles for the reader and arouse the reader’s imagination: “Why did the girl in Hotel World fall to her death? Was it an accident or was it suicide caused by the shame of her recognition that she loved a person of the same sex?” (“Ali Smith: Critical Perspective”). Thursfield also notices how Smith plays with language “not only for its jokes, irony and double meanings, but also to give her narratives tone and psychological complexity”. Each of the characters in Hotel World speaks in her or his own language. Sara’s ghost that is gradually leaving this world also loses its human senses and abilities: “ [as she] slips away into eternity, not only do the colours that she sees and her 6 memory for physical sensations begin to fade, but so too does her verbal reasoning. She begins to forget words”. Sara’s sister expresses her “mental confusion” by swearing. Thursfield further depicts that the other two female characters in Hotel World , Else “the bag lady” and Penny, have their characteristic languages. Else possess “a rich world of inner thoughts that range from the metaphysical poets to the rules of the Winter Shelter” but she is not able to communicate because of her illness. She speaks in short abbreviated chunks of language. On the contrary Penny, a bored journalist, uses rich language but with unimportant meaning. Thursfield also highlights Smith’s interest in death and the question of what happens after death (“Ali Smith: Critical Perspective”). Steven Poole in The Guardian appreciates the way Smith managed the child’s voice in The Accidental : “the child narrator is an aspirational device for the increasingly confident writer. It's a technical summit, like Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto or a 147 break in snooker”. The credibility of Amber’ character becomes a question. “Amber quickly becomes as credible to us as she is to her half-reluctant hosts,“ claims Gail Caldwell in her article, while Michiko Kakutani who claims that Amber was “meant to stir up other people's lives — but she does not even seem credible in this limited role”. Kakutani further questions the very existence of Amber in the story: “Ms. Smith’s efforts to play up Amber's mythic qualities and to underscore the self- conscious, Postmodern aspects of this story feel contrived and clumsy in the extreme” (There Enters a Stranger). Jeff Turrentine offers a completely different point of view on Amber’s occurrence in the novel: “Smith drops subtle and tantalizing hints that Amber may in fact be a projection of the Smarts’ damaged psyches, a shared delusion whose purpose is to rattle them out of their torpor and compel them to act” (“When a Stranger Calls”). Only two of Ali Smith’s literary works has been translated into Czech, the first book is a selection of her stories from her three story books: Free Love and Other Stories (1995), Other Stories and Other Stories (1999) and The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003). The Czech publication’s title is Jiné povídky a jiné povídky (2005). The other writing that was published in the Czech language was Smith’s novel Hotel World under the same title Hotel Svět (2007) . Ladislav Nagy in his review highly appreciates Smith’s work with language and her ability to condense the text into a tight mass. He also claims that much of the story is coded not into the content but into the language (Ali Smith: Hotel World). 7 The purpose of this thesis is to characterize the main aspects of Postmodernism and to show to what degree those aspects appear in the two novels I have chosen. Ali Smith’s novels The Accidental and Hotel World are the primary sources I will analyse in this thesis. The thesis contains five parts. In the first one I will start with the autobiography of Ali Smith, her attitudes toward the conceptions of her writing style, and with the goals of this thesis; the second section deals with the general overview of crucial aspects of Postmodernism and different apprehension of these aspects that I will gather from different secondary sources. The third and fourth parts focus on both novels and the level of application of the Postmodern elements in the content. They also concentrate on the role of language in Smith’s novels and its importance with regard to the Postmodern attitude towards language of a literary work.
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